Reviled as a fascist by his great rival Ben-Gurion, venerated by
Israel’s underclass, the first Israeli to win the Nobel Peace Prize, a
proud Jew but not a conventionally religious one, Menachem Begin was
both complex and controversial. Born in Poland in 1913, Begin was a
youthful admirer of the Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and soon
became a leader within Jabotinsky’s Betar movement. A powerful orator
and mesmerizing public figure, Begin was imprisoned by the Soviets in
1940, joined the Free Polish Army in 1942, and arrived in Palestine as a
Polish soldier shortly thereafter. Joining the underground paramilitary
Irgun in 1943, he achieved instant notoriety for the organization’s
bombings of British military installations and other violent acts.

Intentionally
left out of the new Israeli government, Begin’s right-leaning Herut
political party became a fixture of the opposition to the
Labor-dominated governments of Ben-Gurion and his successors, until the
surprising parliamentary victory of his political coalition in 1977 made
him prime minister. Welcoming Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel
and cosigning a peace treaty with him on the White House lawn in 1979,
Begin accomplished what his predecessors could not. His outreach to
Ethiopian Jews and Vietnamese “boat people” was universally admired, and
his decision to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 is now regarded as
an act of courageous foresight. But the disastrous invasion of Lebanon
to end the PLO’s shelling of Israel’s northern cities, combined with his
declining health and the death of his wife, led Begin to resign in
1983. He spent the next nine years in virtual seclusion, until his death
in 1992. Begin was buried not alongside Israel’s prime ministers, but
alongside the Irgun comrades who died in the struggle to create the
Jewish national home to which he had devoted his life. Daniel Gordis’s
perceptive biography gives us new insight into a remarkable political
figure whose influence continues to be felt both within Israel and
throughout the world.